The Jan. 6 Committee’s hearings are laying bare just how much coordination there was between racist, far-right extremist groups and Trump’s attempt to steal the election.
Last month, a white supremacist traveled hours to a Black neighborhood in Buffalo for the express purpose of killing as many Black people as possible.
And earlier this month the Department of Homeland Security issued a stark warning that the U.S. is in a “heightened threat environment” following “several recent attacks [that] have highlighted the dynamic and complex nature of the threat environment."
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Seems like there’s a theme here. Why, then, is it so hard for Democrats to connect the dots, and communicate to the American people just what exactly is going on here?
Violent extremism, racism, and bigotry are a growing threat, and their ideologies are entwined with mainstream conservatism right now. There, see how easy that was, Democrats?
During one of the 2020 presidential debates, then-President Donald Trump was given the opportunity to denounce the Proud Boys, a neo-fascist militia group. Instead, the president told the group’s members to “stand back and stand by”.
Members of both the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers have since been indicted with seditious conspiracy for their involvement with the insurrection. And the documentarian that followed the leaders of both groups and shared video with the Jan. 6 Committee testified that they didn’t even wait for Trump’s speech that day, instead they were headed to get their teams into position at the Capitol.
The Buffalo domestic terrorist was obsessed with so-called “replacement theory”—the belief that white people are being replaced by people of color, the ideas of which have deep ties to the Republican Party and are amplified by its mainstream propaganda outlet, Fox News.
The nation’s top cop himself, Attorney General Merrick Garland, in May 2021 testified before the Senate Appropriations Committee that the greatest violent threat facing America are “those who advocate for the superiority of the white race.”
It has been crystal clear for quite some time that this isn’t Ronald Reagan’s Republican Party anymore. The new Republican regime is more aligned with members like Reps. Elise Stefanik (who pushed white supremacist theories) and Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar—who don’t even pretend to hide their ideology when attending white supremacist conferences.
Where are these Republican leaders taking their direction from? Donald Trump, the man that on Jan. 6, as the Capitol was under siege in a plume of smoke and chaos, told his rioting followers that he “loved them.” It doesn’t get much clearer than that. Trump said he loved the people that beat police officers, the people that built a gallows to kill his own vice president—of whom he later said that “maybe they are right”.
National elections are won because one side has the ability to tell a better story to voters about who they are and what they can do for the country. However, in the current political climate, it isn’t enough to discuss the “kitchen table issues'' Democrats say they want to focus on. Your kitchen table doesn’t matter if democracy falls, or if you are unable to vote, access an abortion, or live free from abject violence.
If you still believe—as President Joe Biden claimed the other day when he said that “rational republicans” still exist—then you aren’t paying attention.
If Democrats want to win in November they need to showcase to the public that we are no longer living in a “rational” two-party democratic system. Instead, one of the major political parties no longer believes in the rule of law. It believes in violence, it believes in denying a free and fair election, and it believes in (at best) looking the other way when its own members engage in rank racism—when it isn’t blatantly encouraging bigotry itself.
To win elections you have to distinguish yourself and your platform from the other side.
And these dots aren’t hard to connect. But not making these very clear links between white supremacist domestic terrorism and the Republican Party is a choice, and it’s a bad one.
This shouldn’t be so hard. Republicans are working overtime at the state level to create a neo-apartheid state in America where women, people of color, LGBTQ people and Black people have limited rights. Democrats, if they can claim to stand for anything, should be very clear about what they’re against. And they should make that claim over and over again to the American people, who will make the ultimate decision as to whether this remains a free country.
